fantasy author extraordinaire!

Gaming

I’ve been playing a lot of Guild Wars 2 lately instead of writing. Because I apparently have no soul. But! I will say it has been quite the adventure. Some friends finally got the game and we made a guild. There are many lulz to be had. If you want to see just how many, and what exactly I’ve been up to lately,

Maybe the problem is that I’m trying to do too much at once – rewrite Of the Arbour, write Abomination, edit Changeling and The Time Between, edit Purity, write When Gods Descend – or maybe it’s because the STEAM SUMMER SALE just started and I’m a sick human being.

In one day, I managed to buy everything on my wish list: Mass Effect 1 and 2, and the Sims 3 Seasons and University expansions. Mass Effect and the Sims have been dominating my life for the past week; I bought them last Saturday.

That being said, ME is a really good source of inspiration, if only for When Gods Descend (which, by the way, if I forgot to mention, is the working title of the sci-fi story I started).

Writers, though, generally speaking, are an anxious bunch riddled with self-doubt and pitiful isolation. We have a tendency to get caught up in our own worlds and this has a tendency to shut down our brains for a while. Hence, writer’s block. I don’t necessarily have that at the moment – I technically know where I want everything to go – but I’m so distracted by other things I’m having a hard time getting there.

I think my best option would be to cut myself some slack and only focus on one project at a time for a while. Picking one will be hard (probably Abomination, though) and just ignoring all else but that for the time being. Jumping around between so many is getting impossible.

Writer problems, amirite?

Does anybody else have this problem? It’s always so tempting to start something new, and so easy to bail partway through when life gets in the way.

but when I do, I drink Captain Morgan.

On Windy Days awarded me with the Inspiring Blogger Award! I’m flattered and totally deserve it and everything.

The rules!

* Display the award logo on your blog Boom, done!

* Link back to the person who nominated you Good for me!

* State seven things about yourself

* Nominate 15 other bloggers for this award and link to them

* Notify those bloggers of the nomination and the award’s requirements

Seven facts!

I listen to score music more often than I do regular music with vocals and shit. I find listening to scores more inspiring (more on that on an older post) and just better. I feel more when I listen to a score. It’s emotive.

I’ve recently developed an addiction to Guild Wars 2. I have three characters: a level 42 sylvari mesmer, a level 38 human ranger, and a level 3 (woo!) charr engineer. I don’t usually like MMOs, but Guild Wars is special in that you don’t have to pay and you don’t have to play with others. I don’t play well with others; I get freaked out whenever someone tries to add me to their group or guild, due to only ever playing single person RPGs. And I play games so sporadically sometimes that I could never pay monthly.

I’m not super great at learning languages, but maybe one day I’ll shell out the cash to learn Latin and Welsh. Two of the only languages that interest me are both extremely difficult and terribly impractical.

I recently downloaded from Steam the lovable old game Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords, and installed the Restored Content mod that returned to the game content that the developers had to cut prior to the rushed release date. I love this game to bits, due to playing it all the time as a child, and I was fascinated to see what restored content I could fiddle with.

I had always known about the sub-level of the Telos military base, the one with the locked door that you can never enter. Cut content. I always knew it was the door to the HK manufacturing plant that G0-T0 took over after Revan abandoned it. So I was super excited once HK-47 initiated the quest to find out where the HK-50 droids were coming from so he could hunt them down and kill them. Continue reading →

I think I’ve decided that I’m going to self-publish Changeling as an ebook. It’s finished, now that I’ve cut out just under 20 000 words, leaving it around 175 000, and it would help build my portfolio, especially once I publish Purity. As I still mean to publish OtArb the traditional way, it will look good on cover letters and queries to have something published, even if it is by my onesie.

One good thing about having the Sims, other than mindless, soul-eating entertainment, is the ability to make original characters and play around with them in a setting outside of their stories. I do this quiet frequently, and have the most fun with it – I also get a lot of character ideas from interactions they make in the Sims. For example, when I created Aisling and Alistair from Changeling in the Sims, I got ideas for their future and more characters.

When I had the Sims 2, I made a replica of Caitlyn’s house and made her and Fane. But now that I have the Sims 3, I changed it up a bit. Caitlyn, I’ve made before. I know my way around her head pretty well. So instead, I made Fane and Verity, his long ago love from 1809.

I adore Verity. Let’s just make that clear early on. She’s a hotheaded, seventeen year old uber-devout Catholic hellbent on serving God and her Pope, but she’s also sweet as sugar. She changed Fane’s mind on religion and faith and the differences of them, and their relationship was built on mutual respect and admiration, and was purely wholesome.

It was fun making her in the Sims. Especially because they have a hotheaded option.

Stuffed into an alternate reality where they were able to stay together, Fane launched to the top of the political career while Verity worked first as a businesswoman, then as a teacher. It was the most fun building a life for them.

So here’s an idea of what Fane and Verity look like! (Keep in mind, in my head Fane is a lot skinnier and pointier, due to the being dead thing.)

Oh, and this is this one time Verity was eating dinner, nude, in front of her son, after going to work, nude. Thanks for glitching, Sims!